Are you part of the NICU club? Do you have a child who is still struggling with the effects of being born too soon from preeclampsia? Share your concerns and stories here among parents who have been there.

I am not sure where to post this, so please bear with me if this is not the right place for it. My second son was born when I developed severe preclampsia and HELLP syndrome, at 31 weeks and 5 days weighing 3 pounds. The drs delivered him right on time just as my placenta had started abrupting, so he did not go into any distress and he is now gaining weight and learning how to feed orally so that he can come home to us. My first son was born at 32 weeks and 5 days when I developed preclampsia, but he was born not breathing and had to be resuscitated, after 3 days when they first fed him breastmilk they discovered a perforation in his intestine and he underwent two surgeries, first to repair the hole and then to re-attach the intestine two months later.
I have been thinking...with my first baby, I went to the hospital with severe abdominal pain at 1am, they decided to induce me due to protein in my urine and high bp. From 1am to about 8:30am I was hooked to the monitors where supposedly they were monitoring the baby's heartbeat. I was completely out of it since they were giving me mag sulfate and other stuff I dont remember. Suddenly after shift change the new nurse realized that my baby's heart rate was dropping and she got the dr and thats when everyone started moving and they took him out, but he was not breathing. The cause for the perforation MIGHT have been from the pressure they used to get him to breathe. Now, my question is if they were monitoring me why did they allow my baby to go into that much distress? Why did they not start moving earlier? And, who should I contact to get these questions answered? The hospital?
Please let me know your views on this. Maybe I should let things be and not stir up anything, but I have been thinking and needed to express them here to see if it is completely baseless.

It's really hard to answer your queston without more details about the situation. It's possible that he was fine until the shift change and at that time his heart rate dropped. It can happen pretty suddenly. The distress also may have had nothing to do with him being able to breathe or not. Some babies lungs mature sooner than others. He was early and was not ready to breathe on his own.

I think if you really need answers you coudl request the records from the hospital (both his and yours.)

Both your and the baby's condition can change in very little time (hence why the constant monitoring). Really you would need to check the medical records and see if they have the constnat fetal readouts included in the records (remember all those little strips of paper that they record your NST's, bp readings and such on)

Being quite frank, much of medical care is a complicated balancing act of seeing just how far the doctors can push something. They may wait until its a dire situation just to buy a little more time especially when dealing with birth. We may not think that an extra hour would really help that much, but with as limitied as our knowledge still is on birth and development, that extra hour could be very important.